Protesters defend San Francisco woman, 98, from eviction

Mary Phillips has lived in the same San Francisco apartment for more than half of her 98 years on Earth, and this week she's saying that even an eviction notice isn’t going to get her to move.

Fifty years after she first started receiving mail on Dolores
Street, the nonagenarian and the rest of the residents of her
building now face an imminent eviction because the property’s
owner, Urban Green Investments, is relying on California’s Ellis
Act of 1986 to give tenants the boot.

Under the Ellis Act, landlords can unconditionally evict tenants
in order to get out of the renting business. The Anti-Eviction
Mapping Project claims UGI’s owner relied on the act no fewer than
43 times to unload unwanted properties during the last decade,
however, and alleges that the company is merely buying and
selling buildings in order to turn a profit.

"[UGI] is taking advantage of a political economy that the
tech community has fueled," Erin McElroy ofEviction Free San
Francisco told Business Insider this week, referring to the
environment that has made the region one of the most costly areas
to live in in America.

“I’ve been very happy here,” Phillips pleaded with local
network KRON 4 this week. “I’ve always paid my
rent, I’ve never been late.”

Nevertheless, property owners are allowed under the Ellis Act to
evict tenants like Phillips if they say they want to stop
renting, and often they have to compensate the party with a few
thousand dollars, at most, which could be earned back in a few
months’ time by flipping the property or having it leased to
someone else at a much higher rate.

“What we’ve seen is groups of investors are banding together
to buy property, usually it’s when a landlord dies and it’s sold
as an estate sale, or when someone just wants to sell to retire
and then the speculator buys the property evicts the tenants by
using the Ellis Act,” Steve Collier of Tenderloin Housing
Clinic explained to a local NBC affiliate last year.

Philips was first told she’d be evicted last April, shortly after
UGI took control of the Dolores St. building. Now more than one
year later with an eviction more imminent than ever, anti-Ellis
Act demonstrators protested outside of the property’s owners
office on Wednesday this week to urge UGI to leave the building
and its residents alone.

Eviction Free San Francisco’s McElroy was among the attendees at
this week’s protest, and told Business Insider that a solution to
Ellis Act abuse could be a ballot measure she’s currently touting
around town. If approved, property owners who sell-off buildings
within one year of purchase would be taxed 24 percent on that
sale, compared to a 14 percent tax for those who sell within five
years.

"We've actually found that 79 percent of Ellis Act evictions
happen within five years of ownership, which means it's primarily
speculators and investors [doing this], and that's who we want to
target with this tax," McElroy explained to BI during
Wednesday’s event.

Tax or no tax, Phillips says she isn’t going to leave anytime
soon.

“They’re going to have to take me out of here feet
first," she told KRON. “Just because of your age, don’t
let people push you around."